ismal failure of all his efforts, the dying
down of desire and ambition. From the general narrative there stood out
little pictures of individual persons or scenes, clear cut and
masterly--of his father, the Gainsborough churchwarden; of his
Methodistical mother, who had all her life lamented her own beauty as a
special snare of Satan, and who since her husband's death had refused to
see her son on the ground that his opinions 'had vexed his father'; of
his first ardent worship of knowledge, and passion to communicate it;
and of the first intuitions in lecture, face to face with an
undergraduate, alone in college rooms, sometimes alone on Alpine
heights, of something cold, impotent and baffling in himself, which was
to stand for ever between him and action, between him and human
affection; the growth of the critical pessimist sense which laid the axe
to the root of enthusiasm after enthusiasm, friendship after
friendship--which made other men feel him inhuman, intangible, a
skeleton at the feast: and the persistence through it all of a kind of
hunger for life and its satisfactions, which the will was more and more
powerless to satisfy: all these Langham put into words with an
extraordinary magic and delicacy of phrase. There was something in him
which found a kind of pleasure in the long analysis, which took pains
that it should be infinitely well done.

Rose followed him breathlessly. If she had known more of literature she
would have realised that she was witnessing a masterly dissection of one
of those many morbid growths of which our nineteenth century psychology
is full. But she was anything but literary, and she could not analyse
her excitement. The man's physical charm, his melancholy, the intensity
of what he said, affected, unsteadied her as music was apt to affect
her. And through it all there was the strange girlish pride that this
should have befallen _her_; a first crude intoxicating sense of the
power over human lives which was to be hers, mingled with a desperate
anxiety to be equal to the occasion, to play her part well.

'So you see,' said Langham at last, with a great effort (to do him
justice) to climb back on to some ordinary level of conversation; 'all
these transcendentalisms apart, I am about the most unfit man in the
world for a college tutor. The undergraduates regard me as a
shilly-shallying pedant. On my part,' he added drily, 'I am not slow to
retaliate. Every term I live I find the young ma